The Northern Lights: Where, Why and How Almost everyone who travels to Finnmark or the North of Troms in Norway, is chasing the same thing, whether they say it out loud or not. A night when the sky stops being a sky and starts moving. The aurora borealis is the reason a lot of visitors (and even some locals) put up with sub-zero temperatures and long, dark drives in the first place, and it deserves a proper explanation rather than just a photo gallery — what it actually is, why it happens here specifically, and how to give yourself the best realistic shot at seeing it. What's actually happening up there 🌠 The sun isn't just a ball of light — it constantly throws off a stream of charged particles called the solar wind, and every so often, a solar flare or coronal mass ejection sends a much larger, faster burst of that material toward Earth. Most of it gets deflected by Earth's magnetic field, but the field itself funnels a portion of those particles down toward the two magn...
Vuonnamárkanat: The Sámi Market in Varangerbotn In the winter of the late 1600s, a Norwegian bailiff named Niels Knag sat down and wrote out who actually showed up to trade at a market held every January 22nd at the head of the Varangerfjord. His list reads almost like a roll call of the entire top corner of Europe: Norwegians, coastal and inland Sámi from Varanger and Tana , Sámi traders from Laksefjord, townspeople from Vadsø, Kiberg and Vardø, Swedish merchants from Torneå, Sámi from the Swedish side of the border, and traders from Russian Kola. King Christian V had ordered the market established in 1688, and for generations afterward, this stretch of fjord became the one place in the far north where half a dozen peoples who otherwise rarely crossed paths came together, once a year, to trade. That market eventually stopped happening. What exists today under the name Vuonnamárkanat — held every year on the last Saturday of August in Varangerbotn — is its modern revival, and underst...